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Couchbase disk performance vs MySQL

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Fri, 11/02/2012 - 07:51
Idan
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I intend to store quite a lot of data in the database (a few terabyes). Using Couchbase it can be quite expensive, because you need a lot of ram to store all the data. I wanted to know if I don't intend to use such high amount of ram, how the performance compared to MySQL. I just can't see myself paying for terabyes of RAM in order to work with high data capacity web application. Can you give me some insight?

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Fri, 11/02/2012 - 08:27
tgrall
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Idan,

Let me answer this question in 2 parts:

1 - "performances and disk"
Take a look to the following chapter in the documentation and you will understand it is really fast even if you do not have "all in memory"
http://www.couchbase.com/docs/couchbase-manual-2.0/couchbase-architectur...

2 - sizing and working set
This chapter explain how you should size your server:
http://www.couchbase.com/docs/couchbase-manual-2.0/couchbase-bestpractic...

Couchbase is known to be really really fast and as you can guess it is not always possible to put all the data in memory.

We do not have "comparison" of Couchbase vs MySQL because most of the time it does not make sense to compare a relational DB to a NoSQL, since you have many other things to look at : how you scale out, sharding of data, design of the data, ... but we have 2 interesting benchmarks that have been done by Cisco and another one by Altoros an independant consulting company:
http://blog.couchbase.com/understanding-performance-benchmark-published-...
http://www.slideshare.net/renatko/couchbase-performance-benchmarking

Regards
Tug

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Mon, 11/05/2012 - 02:12
Idan
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I still don't understand. Let's say that I have 100GB of data on disk and I want to work with a 16GB server - will couchbase continue to work but with less performance, or I need to handle errors in my application, and if so how?

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Mon, 11/05/2012 - 02:19
tgrall
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Idan,

You do not need to have "all you data" in memory to have a working application.

Couchbase will manage it's memory automatically. Will get the data from the disk and put them in memory as needed. When the memory allocated to the database is full, Couchbase automatically remove the oldest item from the cache to put the new one into it.

For me the performance will still be excellent since you you have an powerful cache manage automatically for you. If you use MySQL you will nee to manage the cache yourself.

Tug

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